Amelia Parker
Executive Director
E-Mail: amelia(at)pbiusa.org
Amelia Parker has worked in the field of human rights for over 25 years, working both at home and abroad. In 2000, she traveled to Ghana to work for the Legal Resources Centre, where she researched the right to work of Sierra Leonean refugees, as well as the human rights implication of water privatization in Ghana. Also during the early part of the 2000s, she served as a Legislative Coordinator for Amnesty International - USA for the state of Tennessee. In 2006, she joined the staff of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Washington, DC as program coordinator where she designed and implemented human rights programming such as the Genocide Teaching Project, which trained law students to teach the lessons of genocide in area high schools. Most recently, her focus has been on the domestic implementation of human rights laws in the U.S. In 2007, she published an article concerning racial inequalities in the U.S. public education system and U.S. non-compliance with international treaty norms, which led to her being a contributing author to the U.S. Human Rights Network’s shadow report on U.S. compliance to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Amelia served as executive director of a community organizing non-profit in Tennessee called Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM) from 2009-2013 before joining the staff at PBI-USA in 2014 as Executive Director. Amelia is most at home helping to build and support movements for social justice. In her hometown of Knoxville, Amelia helped found the local Black Lives Matter chapter, a movement to stop school push out, a political movement to empower the poor and marginalized, and so much more. In addition to working for PBI-USA, Amelia also serves on the Knoxville (TN) City Council as the at-large seat C representative. In 2023, she was awarded the Local Legislator of the Year Award by the National Homelessness Law Center and was also elected to a second and final 4-year term on the Knoxville City Council.
For general inquiries, please email info(at)pbiusa.org